District B13

3 comments on Hacker News

1. NegativecrdbJan 18, 2016

   I would caution against extrapolating from your experience. You must have been living in a good district with a decent school (and if you've been in France for any period of time you'll know that fighting for the right school is almost the most important thing in parents' lives and can even decide elections). Crucially, as there are much fewer private schools in France than say the UK or the US, the elite will instead make public superschools and then use connections and districts to put their kids in them (and get the taxpayer to foot the bill), the most famous being Henri IV and Louis le Grand in Paris, but this system applies to all regions (AFAIK).

   Anecdotal evidence: my "college" or middle school equivalent (which I won't name and shame) in Grenoble had a much less interesting canteen. For example, the fries (served with every meal) were undercooked, sometimes still frozen inside, and we occasionally found worms. The queue for food could be as long as 45 minutes, forcing everybody to gulp down their food as fast as they could so as not to be late to the next class. The food was always deep fried meat or equivalents. A decent part of the student population was quite fat, although not to US or UK levels of obesity.

   France is like the US. You have areas like Manhattan or Santa Monica, and you have areas like North Virginia or Ohio, all with their own history, local funding, civil servants providing wildly differing levels of service. Paris is almost another country (and its residents definitely see "provinciaux" as foreigners), maybe even more so than with London and the UK.

   For a deep dive down the other end, I recommend the movie "Journee de la Jupe" which gives you a taste of the ZEP schools (arguably the worst in France), it's a bit more realistic than "Banlieue 13".

2. NeutralAdamAtomicNov 20, 2009

   hey hackers, matthew pointed me here and I thought I'd share some stats (more about the Flash version than the iPhone version but yea)

   Days spent making Canabalt: 5 (long ones) Hits on my server: ~2 million Hits on other major portals: ~2 million Estimated hits on crappy portals: ~4 million+? Hits on my server from twitter: 50k+ Best Referrer: Stumbleupon Money from donations: ~$500 iPhone sales: can't say but good enough! Top App Store Ranking: 37 Bandwidth Bills: $1000+ Top legit score I've ever seen: ~30km My top score: ~8km Resolution: 480px x 160px Initial Piracy Rate: 12% Current Piracy Rate: 25%

   Inspirations: Half Life 2, District 9, Banlieue 13, Another World/Flashback/Prince of Persia, War of the Worlds (book, not movie)

   Trivia: I never finished drawing the space ship that flies by since it is barely on-screen for more than a few minutes. Sadly, multiple screenshots have captured it in all its under-realized sloppiness.

3. PositivedkarlOct 19, 2009

   For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are getting in on the act -- is this bad news?

   Five reasons why it isn't:

   1. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie Banlieue 13, which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a "big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.)

   2. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of loserdom.

   3. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become superstars.

   4. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone-deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened long ago.

   5. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of "feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi ultimately means more good "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety of good sci-fi for everybody to read.